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One Small Step

This site is really just the starting point for great things to come. The goal of this site is to be the place to come for answers to your trickiest (and simplest) development and design questions about the Open Web Platform.

For years, web developers have had to rely on multiple sites to help them learn web programming or design, each with one piece of the puzzle. Great sites appear, covering one or two subjects, but too often fail to keep up with the rapid pace of changes to the web platform. This may have been good enough when the web was just simple HTML, basic CSS, and maybe a little JavaScript, but that was a long time ago. Today’s web is more than just documents, it’s applications and multimedia, and it’s changing at a breakneck pace.

WebPlatform.org will have accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive references and tutorials for every part of client-side development and design, with quirks and bugs revealed and explained. It will have in-depth indicators of browser support and interoperability, with links to tests for specific features. It will feature discussions and script libraries for cutting-edge features at various states of implementation or standardization, with the opportunity to give feedback into the process before the features are locked down. It will have features to let you experiment with and share code snippets, examples, and solutions. It will have an API to access the structured information for easy reuse. It will have resources for teachers to help them train their students with critical skills. It will have information you just can’t get anywhere else, and it will have it all in one place.

But it doesn’t. Not yet. Right now, it has a wiki, docs.webplatform.org, which anyone with an account can edit, and structured templates for ensuring consistency. It has a massive import of data from Microsoft, Opera, Google, Facebook, Mozilla, Nokia, Adobe, and W3C, still in a rough form, that needs a lot of polishing. It has a chat channel and Q&A forums, and a blog. And all this material will be available free, for anyone to use for any purpose.

This is an alpha release. There is much to do, and we think that the best way to achieve our goal of a comprehensive, up-to-date, and useful site is to enable the entire community to shape it, to meet our needs together. So in the spirit of “release early, release often”, we decided to announce the site at the earliest possible point, and improve it in public… with the web community.

This site has the backing of some of the biggest players on the Web: Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera. These organizations are stewards for the project, enabling W3C to convene the community and grow the site. Beyond their strong organizational commitment, dedicated individuals from these organizations have invested time to make this happen. Moving forward, it will likewise be dedicated individuals –hopefully including you– who help keep the site up to date, make sure that the information is pragmatic and useful, that the features meet real-world needs, and that people find the help they are looking for.

The stewards, those organizations who have put so much into this so far, are going to keep putting people, content, money, and effort into the site. But they are doing so as peers, with the same privileges available to anyone else who builds up trust and becomes a site admin.

Over the next few months, we will be asking extraordinary members of the community to help lead teams that will tackle particular challenges, whether that is creating new content to strengthen a particular topic, or helping translate the site into their local language, or patrolling the site for outdated, erroneous, or biased content.

Web Platform Docs is the first, and most important piece, of WebPlatform.org. We are here to help you, and to ask for your help to take this giant leap forward for the Web.

The design of Web Platform Docs is awesome. Everything is very organized and easy to navigate around. Great job! I have already been using the svg wiki page for a project I’m currently working on.

How is this site going to be different than the Mozilla Developer Network (developer.mozilla.org)? I think almost every browser vendor has their own learning resources for web developers and there is a lot of overlap (msdn, mdn, dev.opera, safari dev center). It would be great to see all of these resources consolidated into one easy to use website for web developers to use to learn how to program the web. Hopefully webplatform.org will solve this problem.

Yes, most of the stewards have their own developer documentation, but we are looking to shift focus on those sites, so as not to compete with webplatform.org. I can’t speak exactly for the others, but for example, at Opera we have donated all our beginner’s tutorials to the W3C, and are intending to just publish advanced level and more niche topics on dev.opera.com.

Bravo, thank you, and I hope you can live up to your lofty expectations! I’ve already learned about SVG and want to learn about terms I didn’t know existed. I hope this site will be a place I can learn about how websites look that I can’t figure out. Keep up the great work so far!

But I’m also a little confused – I’m still not fully sure what to expect from this site. Is it a place for reference documents? Tutorials? a wiki for the community fill as they see fit?

There is also mention that this is “alpha” – is the platform/software in alpha? is the content in alpha? I would imagine the content (and to a lesser extent the software as well) will be a constantly shifting/improving – or is it more for specifications which will be versioned?

the main focus for now is tutorials and reference material, so useful for anyone who wants to learn more about open standards, whether it is novices wanting to learn the basics, or experienced developers who want to look up data for their job. In the future we will add new things like live code examples, and material specifically for teachers to teach this stuff.

The whole entire project is in alpha really – from the infrastructure to the content – but we decided to get it out there to get people’s reactions and start getting the community’s help.

Yes, additional languages would be a definite plus. I sometimes find some nice little tricks in French or Spanish from time to time, for both Javascript and PHP, and if we were able to create even modest translations of contributions that would give me another task to add on my end.

Finally, and a great job on top of that, thanks guys! I’ve been hoping for something of the like to come to fruition for many years, many of those running over 5 different browsers on 3 OSs trying to get things working well enough for clients to be happy. This will be a breath of fresh air.

Great initiative. Site looks nice, but please pump up the font-size a bit, this is undoable and straining to the eyes when you have to sift through small type like this. Scrolling is less strenuous and therefore better than reduces size.

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This is great. It’s good to think of a website that can truly be a one-stop reference for the web and development. There is so much “junk” out there and I look forward to a solid resource of fresh, innovative ideas that promote web standards and quality code development.

Shall we have a section on Responsive HTML email template design to work with all email clients and browsers? I’ve been working on this project and the resources are all over the place on the web. It would be nice to have one place where everyone contributes to this area as there are so many variables/issues to iron out when designing responsive email html (old school) templates for Microsoft Outlook versions and others.

I’m looking forward coming back often if this will be a central web resource. Thanks!

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Finally, a place to point new web developers where they can learn good practices and how to actually write _working_ code! Great job and I’m looking forward to see where this goes.

THe navigation of the API is horrendous. If the navigation could mimic something like http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/index.html or ANY other site (like say Microsoft even) it would be a million times easier to navigate. Right now EVERYTHING is all lumped together in one long list of links. What if i just want to see what api a specific element has available and not the whole kitchen sink? Please fix this.

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Great initiative, looking forward to what this can contribute to. I’m to see some familiar faces in the promo-video, gives some credibility. But it requires a lot of good data to be the number one resource for a web developer.

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I hope WebPlatform will be the place where developers find the right answers in the future. I will look forward, to see how this project will rock the web. HTML5 has the potential to change things in the web business from scratch.